Yeah, we have those Centaurs walking around with true shot and 20-ish attack, backed up with any skull generators. Use 2 of them in front and guess how many turns it takes to deal 50+ damage when they dodge skulls and our spells are from last century? And any random skull slices through your team.
It looks even worse than venoxias and webspinners of the past – those at least were legends and you could hope they stop cycle when the AI finds a puny skull match instead.
Agree with this, though for me it’s not so much the Centaur troop as the pair of True Shot ability and Skeletons granting skulls and an extra turn on the cheap.
The Agile ability is also a bit over-powered in my view…
Give it time and this will be the only viable combo - I’ve been running it a while and it breezes past anyone in PVP, unless they have the same, and then it’s whose Skeleton fires first wins.
Brings back memories of The Silent One situation a year ago…
What it bring back memories to me is this crying of always like… Every 2-3 weeks. I called it before always something is gonna be whinned out and killed. And am not saying this for me, even when am using that comp, I know I can pick up several other comps and win easy, but its sad and fun at the same time to see how this players kill the comps that would help them so much, I mean… Two common troops should be very accesible and those traits arent even hard to get.
Let’s not descend into the usual nerf-gang vs non-nerf-gang debate. You perceive whining. I perceive imbalance and risk to variety and fun of gameplay. Let the devs judge.
True shot, Worms, Goblins, dragons…I think the imbalances of one have been fixed by another. No longer were we suppressed by the worms of 107 and then latter goblins. With traits very strong teams are coming out of the woodwork and deck variety is now a thing we can rely on. How long has 108 been out? I guess you could say it was a quagmire that fixed itself rather messily but it did fix itself. It took a long time for people to adjust to the update and i now everything should be fine as people discover how traits work with each other and how teams can be made so that you get the best possible everything.
So, I’m not sure what all the fuss about this troop is. I had to grind up the stones to fully trait him, when I did I was, not necessarily underwhelmed, but not as impressed as everyone seems to be. Sure he helps you kill fast, but not really that much faster than other teams I use.
Another awesome counter to him besides entangle is the Paladin. True shot just keeps the Paladin nasty. He can blast the centaur right out of the team with high direct damage.
It would be far more balanced. Instead of making every skull generator much more powerful by in essence turning them all into true damage through the Centaur, it would make the troop’s actual spell more useful.
After getting into a few battles with Centaurs and Wardens over the weekend my analysis is that it’s not so much the True Shot and extra turn Skelly that’s the trouble, it’s also having the Agile trait mixed in with that. Agile is one of those RNG traits that seems to trigger more than 30% of the time (yeah yeah confirmation bias). True Shot is powerful though not impossible on its own. Agile is more random but can be incredibly frustrating when it seems to trigger four times in a row, all that avoidance on top of high health stats can make for a long battle. Again, powerful but not impossible. It’s the combination of Agile and True Shot (on common troops no less!) that seems, at least to me, to veer these troops to being too powerful.
Not sure how to fix it without removing one of traits. Personally I would mind it too much if Agile was replaced with another skill on these common troops, I view is that Agile should be a 3rd unlock, especially on anything Utra-Rare and below. A good use I’ve seen is the Hobgoblin, I’ve run into @eslee hobgoblin imp team and it’s pretty fun actually…the agility can be frustrating but I never felt that it was unfair so to speak. Perhaps have Agile + True Shot only be present in Epic and Legendary troops like Atlanta and Orion, makes it a little harder to unlock. But having this trait combo on commons? No Sir. I do not like it.
As mentioned, having True Shot tied into spell damage instead of skull damage is an excellent suggestion too.
So one further nuance on the Agile trait - and a coding issue I think.
Looks like it rolls the 30% dodge chance ONLY ONCE per ‘volley’ of skulls, so if you (for example) fire Sheggers or KoS and fill the screen with skulls, the 30% chance (which by my recall bias feels more like 75% chance) dodges ALL the 100s of points of damage from all the skulls matched at once.
Conversely, if you get a cascade, so skulls-match, then gems drop and another skulls-match, these count as separate ‘volleys’ and so the 30% dodge chance rolls separately for each one (and I have seen the Centaur dodge the first two in the chain and then get hit by the third ‘volley’ in the cascade of skulls).
I think this is a REAL issue - it treats all simultaneous skull matches as a SINGLE dose of damage and rolls the Agile trait once to prevent all of it or none of it. That (together with my recall bias) makes the Agile trait even more over-powered - that’s a 30% chance to near completely negate the Sheggers/KoS cast, which cost tons of mana to build up.
Unclear if this is how it’s intended to work, or just a consequence of current coding approach with batches of skull damage.
Obviously, I feel it should treat each ‘line’ of skulls as a separate attack and roll them all separately - in which case filling the screen with skulls is likely to get past the Agile trait - which surely is how it should be?
EDIT - so I’ve just seen the exact same situation resolve differently, in that:
KoS fired and made at least three different skull matches in separate 3s/4s
Hobgob with Agile trait - saw the Agile trait flash up but the Hobgob still died from attack damage
i.e. the trait rolled and prevented some of the attacks but not alll?
so am now unclear - maybe it does roll separately?
yet I have seen Agile prevent all the damage when the screen was full of skulls in blocks that made dozens of separate 3s/4s, and cannot believe that a 30% rolled simulatenously on 12+ rolls
Perhaps it calculates critical hits differently as well? Isn’t it entangle that does that? Blocks all the base skull damage but one or two points of damage still get through on crits.
So let me chime in here on one small point: Sheggra and KoS are still, in my opinion, two of the most powerful troops in the game, and in a good combo wreak massive amounts of chaos and damage, even when not maxed out with full traits and mythic status. Of the two, I only have KoS; he was a recent acquisition and I haven’t leveled him yet due to soul requirements elsewhere.
So I only see either of these troops in other teams. Perhaps it feels different to wield such power oneself instead of having to face it. But as it is for me, right now, these troops are a terror. No matter what I can do, they can still one shot any of my troops. (I will caveat this by saying I have not tried an entangle strategy, though I wonder if it helps much.)
So here, I see people talking about new, viable strategies to counter such powerful troops as if it’s the end of their viability. Personally? I have hope, not despair. Yes, the traits given to centaurs are powerful, and I will not judge whether or not they are too powerful as I have not traited my centaurs yet at all, so I have not tried it. But as a good counter to powerful troops, I think it may not all be a bad thing.
I seem to play devil’s advocate a lot more than I’m used to on this forum… It’s weird.
I believe this is part of the Agile bug with the unit being both dead and alive. I sent them a recreation with KoS causing 3 match 3s, with the agile bug triggering and the unit being mostly dead. So in the 3 - 3 skull matches, the Agile unit didn’t dodge all 3, but was killed and bugged out.
Massive matches of skulls, do seem to become one application of damage. I say this from watching how many +gold items pop up. 20 skulls in one group only pop +gold once.
So when you pop one of those abilities, how many unique sets of skulls occurred?
Another reason the issue occurs is because of how the Sheggra bug was originally fixed.
Previously the game counted each set of skulls separately and unleashed them on troops one by one. This was fixed however by calculating the the total skull damage and unleashing it all at once. At this time, Agile calculates the total skull roll after the dodge chance and avoids the (now) one time calculated hit.
It’s not that Agile was intended to do this (as is clear by the multitude of bugs centered around it), but it’s built in the fashion to avoid a singular hit, and multiple skull drops being added up into a singular hit causes the issue.
